Worship - 24 May 2026

Summary Of This Week's Theme

Wind is a remarkable thing: invisible, yet immensely powerful. Human beings learned long ago to harness it with windmills, attempting, in a sense, to tame the wildness of the wind — or to catch it. Which might remind us of Donovan’s 1960s song, Catch the Wind, a song about impossibility: “I may as well try and catch the wind.”

Catching the wind is not easy. We cannot see it directly, only its effects: leaves moving in trees, flags flapping, dust swirling, windows rattling under Menorca’s Tramuntana. The wind is invisible, but its presence is unmistakable.

So it is with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Spirit, wind, and breath are intertwined in the languages of the Bible: ruach in Hebrew and pneuma in Greek can mean all three. The Spirit is known not by visibility, but by action. In Acts, the evidence of the Spirit was not merely tongues of flame, but people speaking of God’s deeds in many languages, each heard and understood by strangers from different nations.

Language matters deeply in human history. In 1492, Antonio de Nebrija presented Queen Isabella of Spain with the first grammar of the Spanish language. He told her that language would serve empire: conquered peoples would need to accept the conqueror’s laws and language. “Language always accompanies empire,” he wrote.

Pentecost offers the opposite vision. God does not impose one sacred language. Instead, every person hears the Gospel in their own native tongue. The Spirit affirms diversity rather than erasing it. Difference is not a problem to overcome, but something holy. “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh” — not to make everyone the same, but to bless humanity in all its variety.

Sadly, history shows how often Christians have failed to listen to unfamiliar voices, treating others as inferior because of language, culture, or appearance. Yet Pentecost calls us to another way: a communion where difference remains, but love binds people together around one table.

And perhaps Catch the Wind can be heard as a love song between God and humanity. The Spirit — invisible, powerful, impossible to contain — longs to dwell within us. The Holy Spirit that descended at Pentecost is, finally, the Spirit of divine love.

And unlike the wind in Donovan’s song, this Spirit is longing to be caught.